Known from the state of the art are field devices, which are used in industrial plants. In process automation, same as in manufacturing automation, field devices are often applied. Referred to as field devices are, in principle, all devices, which are applied near to the process and which deliver, or process, process relevant information. Thus, field devices are used for registering and/or influencing process variables. Serving for registering process variables are measuring devices, e.g. sensors. These are used, for example, for pressure- and temperature measurement, conductivity measurement, flow measurement, pH measurement, fill level measurement, etc., and register the corresponding process variables, pressure, temperature, conductivity, flow, pH-value, fill level, etc. Used for influencing process variables are actuators. These are, for example, pumps or valves, which can influence the flow of a liquid in a pipe or the fill level in a container. Besides the above mentioned measuring devices and actuators, understood to be field devices are also remote I/Os, radio adapters, and, generally, devices, which are arranged at the field level.
A large number of such field devices are produced and sold by the Endress+Hauser group.
In modern industrial plants, field devices are, as a rule, connected via communication networks, such as, for example, fieldbusses (ProfiBus®, Foundation® Fieldbus, HART®, etc.), with superordinated units. Superordinated unit include control units, such as, for example, a PLC (programmable logic controller). Superordinated units serve, among other things, for process control, as well as for start-up of the field devices. The measured values registered by field devices, especially sensors, are transmitted via the particular bus system to one or more superordinated units, which, in given cases, further process the measured values and forward them to the control room of the plant. The control room serves for process visualizing, process monitoring and process control via the superordinated units. Along with that, also data transmission from the superordinated unit via the bus system to the field devices is required, especially for configuration and parametering of field devices as well as for operating actuators.
The communication networks are, as a rule, closed bus systems, which provide no outwardly freely configurable, or freely accessible data interfaces. A further use of the data generated and/or exchanged within the communication network outside of the communication network is thus difficult and is not implementable without cooperation of the system provider.
For users, who apply different bus systems in their plants, there is basically no possibility to bring together data from these different bus systems into a central system at an acceptable cost/benefit ratio.
Technologies, such as, for example, the OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA for short) offer an opportunity for representing data in a universal information model, however, such requires the acceptance and integration of the needed software components into all participating bus systems and field devices. While this can be done for plants with a manageable number of field devices, the effort and requirements increase, when these field devices are geographically distributed. The amount of data balloons in size, moreover, with an increasing number of field devices, which, in turn, leads to the fact that a corresponding infrastructure must be present and power demands must be fulfilled.
With increased technological development in recent times in the fields of “IoT” (“Internet of Things”) and “Industry 4.0”, in the meantime, technologies, tools and services have become available also for registering, processing and storing large amounts of data (keywords for this are “Cloud”, “Web Services”, “Big Data Analytics”, etc.). Unsolved, currently, however, is still the posed problem of generically providing data of field devices registered via heterogeneous communication paths and offering the user, as simply as possible, options for further processing independently of operating system, driver standard or communication interface of the field devices. The current standards, both at the field level as well as also at the driver level, have technological dependencies, which strongly make difficult simple installation, configuration and updating in the case of new functions or in the case of removing safety/security problems. The support of mobile platforms is, in such case, almost nonexistent.